Understanding The Psychology Of Gang Members

A lot of energy is currently being directed into solving the gang problem. I grew up in a family full of gang members, so I have some idea. My father was one, my uncle was one, and my brother and one cousin grew up to be one. I went on to get a master’s degree in psychology, so have some special insight into the workings of gang member psychology. This essay shares some of my relevant observations.

The first point worth noting is that the mainstream narrative around the psychology of gang members is grossly inaccurate. This is because the mainstream narrative has been determined and advanced by middle-class people with no experience of gang culture.

Thus, there any many common misconceptions. In reality, people don’t join gangs for economic reasons. If they did, then wealthy America would have far fewer gangs than India and China, when the reverse is actually true. Neither do they join gangs because of colonisation. If they did, there would be no such things as white gangs. Nor would there be Tongan gang members, as Tongans were never colonised. Neither do they join gangs because of a lack of educational opportunities. The narrative that poverty, colonisation or lack of opportunities causes gang membership is pure Marxism.

In truth, people generally join gangs because they are horribly anti-social, and in joining a gang find a community of like-minded people. The vast majority of anti-social mentality comes, in turn, from two major causes: one material, one spiritual.

The material cause is really physiological: abuse and neglect resulting from shit parenting. Shit parents hit their kids, swear at them, lose their tempers in unpredictable ways, and fail to meet their children’s emotional needs. Shit parents fight with each other, do hard drugs, get institutionalised, break up with each other and refuse to get their own mental illnesses treated. All of this leads to immense stress in their children during their most crucial developmental years.

This stress leads to severe delays in emotional development. Brain structures exposed to massive traumatic stress in early childhood can mis- or underdevelop in a wide variety of ways. This leads to behaviours commonly seen in gang members, such as getting upset easily, which is often a consequence of a phenomenon known as limbic hijack. The brain is wired to react to threats to one’s person, and other considerations (such as long-term consequences or consideration for other people) are deprioritised.

The end result is selfishness. A person who is suffering naturally puts themselves first, so a person who is habitually suffering learns to habitually put themselves first. For someone who has consistently done so throughout their formative years, selfishness becomes character. People who have suffered a lot as children tend to put themselves first as adults even when inappropriate to do so – as if they were still children. Understanding this lingering trauma-based childishness is key to understanding the psychology of gang members.

The vast majority of gang members have suffered an upbringing characterised by severe abuse and neglect, whether physical or psychological. This is why the first thing that has to be understood about gang members is that they are, emotionally speaking, literally children still. If you would take the mind of a three-year old child and put it in the body of a 110kg male who everyone else was scared of, it would behave with similar levels of impulsivity, selfishness and aggression to the typical gang member.

A recent X post by Steve Stewart-Williams showed that toddlers are the most violent age group of all, and that people gradually become less violent as they age out of toddler mentality and grow into adults. Anyone whose emotional development is stunted, e.g. by traumatic abuse and neglect, won’t grow out of this toddler phase as fast, if at all. Some of those end up as manchildren with tattoos and bad attitudes.

It’s at this point where a reader might object that the vast majority of abused children do not go on to become anti-social or gang members. This is absolutely correct. The second factor, the spiritual factor, must be in play as well.

The spiritual cause of anti-social behaviour is even more complex than the material. Ultimately it’s a matter of thinking that evil is good and good is evil. This requires a complete spiritual warping, something that usually only happens in evil circumstances.

The main spiritual aspect is mimicry. Growing up trash like I did, I observed the high esteem afforded to adults in gangs. Other family members acted like older people who were in gangs, whether family or friends, were the coolest thing that it was possible to be. Men who had reputations for being particularly aggressive or cruel were afforded the most respect of all. In an anti-social environment like this, normal and healthy moral values are twisted and warped beyond recognition.

In anti-social families like mine – of which there are thousands in New Zealand alone – decent people are treated with contempt. As with pre-civilisational savages, kindness is seen as a weakness. Respect comes from having done time in prison, or having earned a reputation as a fighter. Children in such environments naturally mimic the displayed values of their elders, and come to value aggression and cruelty themselves. In doing so they start to climb the reverse dominance hierarchy of the anti-social. In this reverse dominance hierarchy, feelings are weakness, and turning them off and going down the psychopathy spectrum, a.k.a. “hardening up”, is an act of heroism.

A normal person would be ashamed to behave with the mindless, impulsive aggression that the typical gang member does. Gang members don’t think of their actions as childish, though, but rather classy, rebellious, cool or heroic – much the same way children rationalise abusing people. Do you remember hitting a younger sibling to “teach them a lesson”? If so, you have a good idea.

In a gang environment, however, all the common values are inverted. Reckless stupidity becomes bravery. Mindless sadism becomes dominance. Shallow preening and posturing becomes class. Perhaps worst of all, a soulless moral nihilism becomes dispassionate reason. It’s a total slave morality, but with a bestial veneer. A moral revolt of those not even fit to be slaves.

Perhaps the crucial spiritual aspect is a refusal to believe in any spiritual consequences for selfish actions. Of all the gang members I have met, I have never met one who believed in karma, and if I ever did I would assume that this person was on the way out of the gang scene. The universal logic seems to be that if you can escape legal consequences, then you escape consequences.

In summary, it’s the combination of bad material and bad spiritual influences that creates the anti-social mindset that leads to people joining gangs.

Just getting abused doesn’t make a gang member. Many people who get heavily abused as children become depressed rather than sadistic. Many swear off the idea of violence altogether and become the most peaceful people of all. A heavily abused child is many times more likely to become sadistic than a non-abused one, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Just being evil doesn’t make a gang member either. Plenty of evil people go into politics, religion or marketing instead of becoming gang members. Many would argue they cause much more suffering thereby. Gang members are rare: there are around 10,000 in New Zealand, which is only 1 in every 500 people. If the rate of evil in the general population is 5%, then gang members make up at most 1 in every 25 evil people.

The combination of physical and psychological damage is key. An abused child who has learned that gang members are exemplary has no real chance at life. It’s very likely they become a gang member too (there are multiple men in my family in this category). The only real solution – given that gang members are allowed to breed – is philosophy.

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The Third Acceptance Of Alternative Centrism

The Third Acceptance of alternative centrism is the acceptance that the Establishment Centre is correct when they speak of the importance of peace.

The Establishment Right and the Establishment Left love to fight. Both feel that they have a legitimate right to rule and are willing to assert that right with force. Thus, much of the march of history is one ruling class fighting a would-be ruling class, back and forth, over years, decades and centuries. Whether it’s nations or classes doesn’t matter. The war to impose order and to be free from someone else’s imposed order goes on and on. Without a peacemaking force that brings both sides to the negotiating table, either side will escalate conflict as soon as they perceive themselves to have an advantage.

This leads to endless war. The logic of extremism is war – the more extreme, the less room for negotiating, thus the more force and aggression. Both the Left and the Right see the will to negotiate peace as weakness. But without peace, nothing gets built, everything gets destroyed. If the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left were the only players in history, it would be a never-ending battlefield, where peace was only achieved by the strong and even then was always temporary. They would lay waste to every facet of civilisation in their fervour to get an edge over the enemy.

When the major political forces act like this, no-one can be wealthy. All wealth is commandeered for the various war efforts, and then destroyed in the war itself. Bombings, artillery strikes and battles destroy buildings and infrastructure. Medical costs from war are extreme, and wounded veterans are much less likely to go on to produce an economic surplus. And of course dead people can’t produce any wealth at all.

Worst of all, the infighting risks that one gets conquered by outsiders. Outside forces that would steal a nation’s wealth take notice when that nation’s Establishment Right and Left are fighting each other. They then swoop in to wipe out the survivors.

This process leads to the rise of the Establishment Centre. The Establishment Centre is not interested in arguments about how the Establishment Right represents quality (or order/stagnation) and the Establishment Left quantity (or freedom/chaos) and blah blah blah. They have little time for the abstract, let alone the metaphysical. They are immensely practical – and equally godless.

The really good thing about the Establishment Centre is that they succeed in getting the other wings of the Establishment to agree on the value of peace, and thereby to negotiate instead of fight. In so doing, they end the cycle of violence between those two wings. This gives them a very special role in the historical development of human society. If the Establishment Centre can negotiate peace between the other wings of the Establishment, prosperity inevitably follows.

Solon might have been the first Establishment Centrist in Western history. He was brought to power at a time when there was immense discord between the wealthy and the poor in Athens. The city-state was on the brink of civil war on account of widespread debt slavery. Both sides trusted him to be an impartial arbiter between them.

The genius of Solon was that he was able to find an acceptable balance between the excessive order of his predecessor Draco, and the excessive chaos of the disadvantaged who wanted to redistribute everything. This did not satisfy the extremists on both sides, but it satisfied enough of the moderates of both sides that they agreed peace was better than further conflict. The influence of Solon’s reforms led directly to the Golden Age of Athens, and he is remembered as one of the Seven Sages of Athens.

The Third Acceptance, then, accepts that peace is more valuable than either excessive order or excessive freedom, and that peace is usually best found by finding the right balance between order and freedom. This Third Acceptance is the key to understanding why the Establishment itself is so enduring – its centre acts to correct any excesses that might form in either wing, so that the overall edifice remains balanced.

In today’s modern democracies, the Establishment Centre often ends up taking control by virtue of controlling the balance of power. Because the most stubborn, irrational and antisocial elements drift to the wings (this is as true of the Alternative as it is of the Establishment), the Establishment Centre often finds itself with more reasonable and intelligent people than either wing. As such, they often come to be seen as the natural leaders of the Establishment.

In New Zealand, this phenomenon is seen with Winston Peters, leader of the pseudo-nationalist New Zealand First party. As an Establishment Centrist, he often finds himself holding the balance of power with 6-7% of the vote. This means that he can play the Establishment Right and Establishment Left off against each other to get the best deal. It also gives him veto power over the makeup of the government. This position in the centre is so powerful that, even after 30 years of broken promises and sleaze, he still cannot be dispensed with. European countries with similar systems often have similar problems.

The phenomenon is not as obvious in America and Britain, because America has a two-party system and Britain has a First Past the Post-style system. Consequently, the largest party in any general election in either country seldom has to rely on the support of the Establishment Centre. It could be, and has been, argued that such an arrangement is inherently unstable and leads to warmongering (the history of America and Britain since the founding of the Federal Reserve certainly supports this argument).

The Establishment Centre, in whatever time and place, is usually full of merchants. If no aristocrats are available to stop the timocrats from fighting, the oligarchs have to step up and find the way to a peace agreement. The Right and the Left might criticise the merchantry as unprincipled, but the merchants themselves would counter that firmly-held principles lead only to bloodshed. Better for everyone to just chill out and trade.

Generally this arrangement has indeed brought peace. It could be argued that historical examples of lengthy peace were often examples of times when the Establishment Centre was in charge. The times of the greatest expansion – and profits – of the British Empire was the time inbetween the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, when men like Nathan Rothschild had the greatest influence. After World War II, another lengthy peace followed the Establishment Centre’s assertion of liberal democracy.

The alternatives to the Establishment Centre finding peace are continual crackdowns and oppression under the Establishment Right, revolutionary chaos under the Establishment Left, or endless warfare under them both. So the Establishment Centre often ends up coming to power, as Solon did, with a mandate from the rest of the Establishment to negotiate peace. The Third Acceptance accepts that this process is natural and good.

There is a problem with eternal peace, though – it leads to the Establishment coming together against the people. This is a unique form of corruption that manifests as degeneracy. It is this process of degeneration and its results that are rejected by the alternative centrist in the Third Rejection.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

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VJMP Anzac Day Address 2025: The Anzac Nation Will Rise From The Ashes Of The Boomers

Great times of change are upon all of Western Civilisation.

Our entire world order has, until now, been based around a post-World War II ideology that was devised by globalist overlords in London, New York and Moscow, and smashed into the heads of the Boomers through television and movies. This ideology came with a complete set of moral values: liberalism, tolerance, diversity, materialism, egocentricism. The order of the Western World is based on this ideology. It’s so deeply ingrained that no movements seem to be able to form outside of it.

The suffocating nature of this ubiquitous ideology is causing great pain to young people, especially the Zoomers and younger Millennials. For them, it feels like the Boomers are exerting an economic stranglehold of such intensity that young people can never get ahead. The house price to wage ratio is four times as high today as it was 30 years ago. Young people watch most of their wages disappear in rents and mortgages, instead of building their own wealth. Creating a family is a forgotten dream for most.

All of this miserable arrangement will change when the Boomers are gone. When this happy day comes, a new way of thinking will prevail in the West. This new way might be better or it might be worse, or a blend of both at the same time, but what is clear is that a new way of thinking will prevail.

The oldest Boomers were born in 1945. That means the oldest of them are now around 80, very close to the natural life expectancy. So Boomers are starting to die off in large numbers. The deathgrip they have had over Western politics is weakening and will continue to weaken. 20 years from now, most Boomers will be dead, and the remainder will be too decrepit to defend that grip on political power. A movement of younger people will then sweep them away. This can be predicted with the confidence that an Anzac in June can predict the return of the Spring in a few months.

When the Boomers are gone, that entire world order based around them will also be gone. And a vacuum will arise.

The prediction of this author is that the post-Boomer ages will be a tough time for most of the world. America will be 50% white once the Boomers are gone. Europe will be whiter but their minorities are even more aggressive and difficult to integrate. China, Japan and Korea are facing fertility rates of less than one child per woman, and China is also facing severe environmental degradation. All of these places will likely have to deal with extreme civil unrest over the coming half a century.

The Anzac Empire, by contrast, will announce itself on the world stage at this time. After we federalise and our population hits 60 million – which ought to happen in 40 years or so – we will be in a position similar to that of America in 1890. We will be in position to take a leading role in the direction of the world.

This will coincide with mass immigration from America and Europe to the Anzac Empire. America and Europe, for all of their troubles, still have enormous numbers of high-value individuals. As the political systems of the Northern Hemisphere collapse, many of those high-value individuals will look for refuge elsewhere. If the Anzac Empire is clever, we will adopt an immigration policy that allows us to maximise the potential benefit of industrious and intelligent people fleeing the Atlantic region of the West, to both us and them.

Currently, the Boomers, having been brainwashed into multicultural equalitarianism, prevent such an intelligent immigration policy.

It’s illuminating to think of Boomers as a dam, holding back the flood of young Anzacs that will wash away the false order of the Boomer Truth Regime. That dam is now cracking. With every Boomer funeral the cracks widen another fraction of a millimetre. When several million of them are gone, that dam will burst, and the old way of doing things will be destroyed in the deluge. With this false order annihilated – and not before then – a new order will rise.

Thus, it is not necessary for young Anzacs to despair on account of how difficult things are right now. There are many good reasons to think that the true Golden Age of the Anzac Empire will begin in some 20-30 years, once the ashes of the Boomers are scattered. At that point, there will be nothing preventing the Anzac youth of today from seizing our own destiny.

As mentioned in a previous address, the Anzac Empire is home to the world’s strongest species of magic mushrooms, psilocybe subaeruginosa. Anyone who wants to prepare themselves for the titanic social shifts that are coming down the pipeline should do this: take a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and meditate upon death, chaos and the inevitability of divine victory.

No honest person can deny that the current order of the world is collapsing. This will be catastrophically painful for most of the world, probably including us. But from the ashes of that old Boomer order, some new and amazing things will arise. The Anzac Empire will be one of them.

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The Second Rejection Of Alternative Centrism

The Second Rejection of alternative centrism is the rejection of excessive freedom. The Second Rejection is the contention that excessive freedom leads to chaos.

Order might be suffocating, and breaking out of an excess of it might feel wonderful. It might feel so wonderful, and the freedom such a relief, that it becomes easy to believe that the more freedom, the better. But, just as with order, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. When the last vestiges of order are obliterated, one is left with something more resembling chaos than freedom.

In the same way that a classroom becomes chaos without a teacher, because all are maximally free, society becomes chaos without a ruler. If you, like me, have had the experience of being a relief teacher of a class of primary school kids stuck inside on a rainy day, you will understand that even the perception of unlimited freedom leads quickly to chaos. The line between freedom and chaos becomes thinner and thinner the more freedom there is.

The valuation of freedom above all rests on a certain interpretation of human nature. The assumption of the Left – both its establishment and alternative forms – is that human nature is inherently good.

Here they go much further than Mencius’s argument that a person observing a child crawling towards a well will naturally act to prevent it falling in. The argument is closer to that of Rousseau’s noble savage, in which human nature, unspoiled by modernity, is naturally desiring of peace and goodwill for all living beings, unblemished by malice.

The main problem is that people are naturally selfish, even if they are not sadistic. The world is complicated, and it’s not always obvious if a certain action is a fair one. Consequently, many people just act on what is best for themselves, and rely on the outside environment to provide self-correction. Thus, simple ignorance is enough to guarantee that, given enough freedom, people will take advantage of each other. Without at least enough order to have law, social carnage is the result.

This is why the belief that people don’t need rulers is considered childish by the alternative centrist. It reminds one of children asserting that they don’t need bedtimes.

One can easily imagine what would happen to a society without any laws. Films such as The Purge give us some idea: there would be enormous numbers of revenge attacks, reprisals and blood feuds. The history of Anglo-Saxon England before the imposition of the Danelaw is rife with blood feuds. We know from psychological studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment that there are very dark streams of malevolence within the human heart. To some extent it’s only fear of legal consequences that keeps this under control.

The French Revolution is perhaps the most famous example of sudden extreme freedom. Although freedom was one of the rallying-cries in 1789, by 1793 the revolutionaries were already chopping off heads en masse. It seems that the more extreme the freedom, the more tenuous, and therefore the greater the need to protect it by purging anyone who might threaten it. This can, of course, be considered a new form of order, which illustrates the degree to which the pendulum of history naturally swings between order and chaos.

The common failure of co-operative societies is a further example. It sounds good having a job where you only work if you feel like it, because it affords the maximum possible freedom from slavery. In practice, few people really feel like it unless they keep their production for themselves. So very little gets done.

Perhaps the failure of Communism itself is the ultimate example. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” would be a great slogan if human nature was inherently highly altruistic, instead of opportunistic and callous. The freedom to choose not to contribute is too much for most. The vast majority of people will choose idleness over drudgery and submission to a boss.

The freedom to remake society is also the freedom to destroy everything good about it. This is never the plan, but seems to nevertheless keep happening. Awareness of this is what inspires the Second Rejection.

The major flaw of leftism in general is the leftist misconception of human nature. Human nature isn’t evil, but it certainly isn’t good either. The Second Rejection is also, implicitly, a rejection of the naivete of the Left. In rejecting absolute freedom, the alternative centrist rejects the inaccurate (both misguided and stupid) narratives about human nature that have plagued the Left since the beginning.

An excess of freedom is not limited to legal freedom. Social freedoms are also political, and also subject to the Second Rejection. At time of writing, the New Zealand Parliament has a Green MP with a reputation for coprophagia embroiled in an indecency scandal, and the Spanish Parliament recently produced someone similar: a man filmed eating his own excrement. The ongoing trans hysteria is another example of freedom having undesirable consequences. The alternative centrist happily says No to such dubious freedoms.

All of this degeneracy reminds of the madness of the Weimar Republic (which presages the Third Rejection).

The general rule could be described thusly: when social order is overturned, freedom is the result, but if a new order is not imposed – at least to some extent – the freedom will collapse into chaos.

Plato describes this exact phenomenon in detail in Republic. A lower class of person demands freedom above any other consideration, such as propriety: “In democracy […] there’s no compulsion […] to submit to authority if you don’t want to.” As a result, democracies lack moral authorities and moral guidance. People simply follow their most bestial impulses – fear, lust, wrath, greed – unless or until something stops them.

The end result of too much freedom, Plato tells us, is tyranny. People who are too free can never agree on what the right way forward is, and the all-too-inevitable end result is the rise of a dictator who promises to use force to smash through the deadlock. It can seen thusly that an excess of order and an excess of freedom both lead to dystopic misery.

Even worse, the struggle between these two visions of dystopia causes more dystopia. Without a mediating force, the Establishment Right and the Establishment Left fight it out on the battlefield, often resulting in Pyrrhic victories for whichever of the two remains.

The alternative centrist, in both the First and the Second Rejections, rejects both too much order and too much chaos. But the problem of warfare between the two remains: the pendulum of history keeps swinging, and with each return destroys the lives of millions. Some degree of balance needs to be struck between order and freedom. This presages the Third Acceptance.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the book that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!